‘Unstoppable’ to ‘Better Man’: Elevating Drama with VFX

A biopic of a British pop star, a psychological thriller and a sports drama don’t have much in common on the surface. But Better Man, A Different Man and Unstoppable do share at least one quality: They all use effects to inform and illuminate character.

In each film, visual effects, both practical and computer-generated, help audiences embrace something unconventional about their protagonists and better understand their virtues and even insecurities. As A Different Man makeup artist and prosthetic designer Mike Marino says of his project, “The message is you don’t have to try to look like something else to be a good person, a quality person, an amazing person.”

Marshaling the technology to achieve that, however, is no easy feat.

In Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, Sebastian Stan stars as Edward Lemuel, a struggling actor with low self-esteem who undergoes a medical procedure to cure him of a condition called neurofibromatosis that has caused his face to be disfigured. His real nightmare begins, however, when he meets the charming Ozwald — played by actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis in real life — and becomes haunted by his confidence.

Stan’s transformation began with 3D scans of his face that were then life-casted to create a plaster-like copy that Marino could sculpt and design. “I studied Adam’s face and made my own version that would work for Sebastian,” he explains. Smaller silicon molds were then made of the facial sculpture and glued on to Stan in a two-hour makeup process each day. It’s an approach that became particularly useful in executing the scenes in which Lemuel’s skin begins to flare up and oozingly melt off of his face — to his horror — following surgery.

“It’s all practical effects,” says Marino, who wanted his work to align with the vintage feel of the movie, which was shot on 16mm film. “I built a very soft version of the makeup where it’s sloughing and sliding off, which actually mirrors David Cronenberg’s The Fly.” (See page 28 for more on The Fly.)

The visuals, he says, aren’t meant to shock the audience; they aim to help viewers connect with the story. “People love something tangible,” notes Marino. “They love to know that the actor is under there and is possibly being tortured. And it’s actually very helpful to the actor because they have to be what they look like. The emotions and the performance are tied to how someone looks.”

In his corner of the film world, Jharrel Jerome used motion training rather than makeup to prepare for his portrayal of Anthony Robles, a former NCAA wrestling champ who was born with one leg, in William Goldenberg’s feature directorial debut, Unstoppable, set for a limited theatrical release Dec. 6. Robles served as Jerome’s body double on set. Then came the work of the VFX team, which used two approaches to blend their bodies together onscreen: AI face replacement and CGI leg replacement.

“Anthony was born with one leg that also extends to his hip bone, so his physiology is really different, and that literally affects how he looks from behind,” explains VFX supervisor Thomas Tannenberger, who used a body scanner with a spherical array of 150 cameras to capture each man’s physique. From there, 3D CG models were created and then combined. “Whenever you see Jharrel, we had to replace him from the hip down,” adds Tannenberger.

Conversely, sometimes Jerome’s face (crafted by an AI model using thousands of images captured from various angles) was imposed on Robles’ body; it would have been simply too hard, filmmakers say, to achieve authenticity on the wrestling scenes without it.

In those intense matches in which “they throw each other around like rag dolls,” says Tannenberger, “Anthony basically has an upper-body strength that I don’t think anyone has ever seen before. He’s that superhero V-shape, which would have been impossible to attain. So, together with the face replacement, we also did a lot of body sculpting in post to make them match more closely.”

He says he’s aware that there has been a backlash to AI being used in this way, with some actors expressing concern that faces and bodies increasingly will be used interchangeably without their owners’ involvement. AI-based performance was at the center of last year’s dual writers and actors strikes. The current SAG-AFTRA contract built in consent for various usages of digital replicas, but there remains much that is practically and ethically fuzzy.

“There are more traditional so-called face-replacement techniques that are almost entirely CGI-based that are very, very expensive still if you want them to be spot-on,” he says. “Even though great progress has been made, this might be the domain of the $200 million blockbuster, which of course this is not. And I don’t think it’s a horrible thing to say that. We had to find a different way.”

It’s a method that’s paid off as far as Tannenberger’s concerned. “I got to see the film at the premiere in Toronto, and I know for a fact that people were surprised when Jharrel came onstage and had two legs. It’s visual effects,” he says. “We never get praised because there are so few instances where people actually come away and say, ‘Oh, wait, this cannot be. How did they do that?’ So I knew at that moment we had done a good job.”

There’s no denying the use of computer imagery in Michael Gracey’s Better Man, in which singer-songwriter Robbie Williams, who’s often said he felt like a dancing monkey attempting to abide by both the music industry and the public’s expectations of him, is presented as just that throughout the film. (Literally, his character appears as a monkey; he’s voiced by Williams, with Jonno Davies as his younger self and also performing the physical movements.)

The challenge for the VFX team was “to make sure that people would identify and engage and be captivated by this character,” says animation supervisor Luke Millar, whose work on the Planet of the Apes franchise prepared him for the task. “We didn’t want it to be jokey, we didn’t want it to be a caricature. [Robbie’s] represented as an ape throughout, but ultimately the character that we’re seeing is human, the emotions are human and the connection you feel with him is human.”

To facilitate that bond, Davies, who wore a gray suit with infrared LED lights for motion capture throughout the entirety of the film, performed all of his scenes with his castmates. “I ban tennis balls on sticks. We never went down that road,” says Millar. “I didn’t want false eyelines, so a lot of the design of the character was all based around Jonno so that when Nicole [Raechelle Banno] looks in Jonno’s eyes and we put Robbie in there, she’s looking into Robbie’s eyes.”

To that end, the filming process wasn’t much different from that of any other project. It’s in postproduction that the graphics and the voice of Williams, who both narrated and performed his musical numbers in the film, came together. “One of the challenges with this movie is there’s like 1,970 odd shots in the film. There’s a lot of work, and you can’t let the mask slip at all,” says Millar.

As more artist biographies await in Hollywood, Millar calls Better Man, which will premiere Christmas Day, “a stand-alone” for its approach, though his hope is that “maybe this will give people confidence that you can make these bolder choices,” he says.

“In all honesty, the story of Robbie isn’t that unique. I think a lot of musicians and artists go through similar experiences. But I like Michael’s lensing on it,” adds Millar. “His idea of telling [the story] from how Robbie sees himself rather than how we all see Robbie is a lovely take on that.”